The General's President (44 page)

The Congressional Committee expects to have the final draft done on this reform bill within a few days. I'll then decree it into law with no delay, and we'll draw up and issue a whole new set of operating guidelines for the Internal Revenue Service, ready for next year.

This will make life a lot simpler and easier, and more pleasant, not only for the taxpayer but for the IRS! Of course, paying taxes is never a joy, but why make it worse than it needs to be.

So I believe you're going to like this new federal tax law. Look it over. Perhaps you'll be letting your state governments hear about reforming state taxes along the same lines.

And that's all I have to talk about tonight. I opened this speech by saying it was time to fill you in on what Haugen's been doing with his time recently, here in Washington. Now you know. Thank you for listening to me, and good night.

THIRTY-NINE

Paul Massey sat grimly watching the six o'clock network news on WTFD-TV. The trial of the three mortarmen who'd shelled the White House got the biggest play; it was visual and exciting. But the president's speech, and responses to it, got a lot of attention too.

Massey had spoken little since watching the speech the night before. Rumors had been rampant on Wall Street for days of a major investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but he'd felt no concern. There'd been big SEC investigations before, and none had touched Massey. He'd been too well buffered.

But Haugen's speech had frightened him, he who couldn't remember feeling frightened since early childhood.

When the weather forecast began, he clicked the set off and keyed Tallmon's apartment on his intercom. A few seconds later, Tallmon's face appeared on the comm screen.

"Yes Mr. Massey?"

"I want to see you at once. In my office."

"Yes sir. At once sir."

Massey sat and waited, even his face immobile. When Tallmon came in, there was no offer of scotch and seltzer, just the order "sit," and a gesture at a chair facing Massey's. Just "sit"; Tallmon knew then that this would be a very unpleasant meeting. But he'd changed since he'd begun his covert revolt; he could confront Massey's displeasure now, however expressed. He sat.

"Haugen is still alive. The attempts on him were clumsy."

Tallmon didn't tell him that, of the publicized attempts, only the ninja attack and the rocket attacks had been by his contractors. The others—the mortar attempt and the fighter plane attempt—had been independent efforts. He also didn't tell him that only two other contracts were pending.

"Yes sir."

"Explain."

"The explanation seems to be that the White House is exceedingly well protected, sir, particularly electronically. There have been attempts on his life that were cut off before they got far enough to make the papers, and he scarcely leaves the White House."

"I do not employ you to explain failures." The phrasing was acid but the delivery monotone.

"Of course not, sir." Tallmon didn't trouble to remind Massey that an explanation of failures was exactly what he'd demanded.

The eyes that probed Tallmon's bland exterior were no longer rational.

"And the media; you were to direct a media war on the man. Yet the worst that I see in the papers is carping and innuendo, and the television criticism is mostly even weaker. There has been no concerted attack, while the clumsy assassination attempts have actually inspired a degree of sympathy and indignation.

"How do you explain
this
? Certainly not protection."

"May I speak frankly, sir?"

Massey's response was a long look and a short reply: "Do so."

"You have considerable influence, sir, but only limited power. There is a difference. In a sense, you are like the Pope: Important people listen to you, but they may or may not do what you want. You have no army to coerce them with, and in times like these, they are much less likely to comply."

Massey said nothing, just looked. Tallmon continued. "You inherited machinery of a sort for brokering power, but it wasn't designed for times like these. That was probably your great grandfather's biggest oversight.

"I was able to contract with people whose service is assassination; they are in the business. But the newspapers, the networks... You might influence their boards of directors, their chairmen, to a degree, but they are more interested in selling papers than they are in advancing your grandfather's philosophy and plans—a philosophy and plans they do not even know. And their editors are another step away from you; they don't know you at all. They know only their publishers, and often do not heed them. While their writers do not know the publishers; they know only their editors.

"Even those that you own, like the Bassett Chain, and the Foremost News Network before it lost its license, operate independently to some degree. There are none who undertake to follow your orders as slavishly as I. They have their own points of view, and their own interests to advance."

He shrugged. "When Haugen has made what they considered serious mistakes, they have jumped on him, perhaps more heavily because of your influence. But so far his mistakes have not been serious enough to result in serious difficulty for him."

Tallmon's voice had been quiet from the beginning, and patient. Now it became faintly sympathetic as well. "In a way, sir," he went on, "your true power is like a glacier; your great grandfather designed it that way. He and his associates set certain things in motion, to move ponderously in a certain approximate direction. Piece by piece they undertook to program the entire American nation to move in that direction, and things
have
moved in that direction. A considerable distance. They planted an orchard of institutions and nurtured their beginning, then allowed them to grow and bear fruit in their own time. They never intended to fight a war for power; cultural evolution was their mode, with themselves as the cultural engineers, so to speak.

"They never devised an effective steering mechanism for their glacier, nor designed any weapons other than financial—no instruments of quick and decisive, far-reaching command. They let it move inexorably on its own, confident that they or their lineage would be in a position to seize the crown when the time came."

Tallmon thought of adding that to seize a crown required a man of action, but he didn't.

"And the people you've engineered into positions of power," he added, "even Coulter, are not your puppets, but only people you influenced, who might be expected to act in appropriate ways."

As he spoke, Tallmon's eyes never left Massey's wooden mask. Surprisingly, Barron Tallmon felt a stirring of something like love, as if for a harsh father come upon hard times in his declining years. "Your great grandfather," he continued, "was a genius, a man of vision and resource. You inherited his wealth and his organization, but you did not inherit..."

Massey interrupted. "How do you know so much about my great grandfather?" The eyes burned cold and bitter.

"I read some things in your personal safe." Tallmon gestured at the concealing picture on the wall. "The book on the Archons, and other things."

"Then you spied on me." Massey's voice was still quiet, still expressionless.

"Yes sir. I used a tiny surveillance device to obtain the combination."

Quietly, Massey's hand had drawn out a desk drawer. Now it brought forth a pistol, with a silencer that made it seem larger than it was. Tallmon watched the muzzle move to point at him. And wasn't afraid.
This is what we've been working toward all these years
, he thought. He would have to hurry to tell him his act of ultimate treason.

"And I photocopied them," Tallmon added. "And sent the photocopies to General Cromwell. So far, he hasn't even seen fit to do any..."

The crooked finger tightened, firing the pistol, the .32 caliber slug striking Tallmon in the center of the chest. His mouth fell open, not from surprise, for he wasn't surprised, but in death. The bullet had pierced his breastbone and heart, and then the chairback. After a suspended second, what had been Barron Tallmon folded forward and toppled off the chair.

Massey sat expressionless for perhaps half a minute, looking coldly at the body. Then he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger again.

FORTY

The air was thick with large wet snowflakes, and Jumper Cromwell had ridden to the White House in a chauffeured staff car. Even with slippery streets, a car seemed better than a helicopter in the heavy snowstorm. He got out in front of the South Portico, where a snowman greeted him with widespread arms—brooms—and a jaunty grin dug into the snow face as if with two fingers. It wore a scarf whitened with new flakes, and a snow-covered basket resembling a coolie hat that shielded the bottle-cap eyes.

The new roof on the East Wing Theater had been completed over the weekend, Cromwell noticed. The mortar attack had done the first hostile damage to the White House since the British had burned it in 1814, and surely the most aggravating. The trial was already over, and the three men sent to Alcatraz Penitentiary, renovated during the Wheeler Administration.

Cromwell had deliberately arrived nearly a quarter hour before the NSC meeting was scheduled to begin. He walked briskly to the Executive Wing through eight inches of white, stomping the snow off his feet in the small portico there. Then he went in, returning the salutes of the marines at the door, and entered Martinelli's office.

"Good morning, Jeanne," he said. In these days almost everyone addressed her as the president did.

"It is if you like snow," she answered cheerfully. "Shall I let President Haugen know you're here?"

"Yes, if you please."

She did, then looked up again at the general. "You can go in now, sir."

The president had rolled his chair back from the desk and watched Cromwell enter. "What do you think of the weather?" he asked with a grin.

"It looks like your marines like it. They built a snowman in your south yard."

"Huh! That wasn't the marines; that was Lois and me. We got up early to play in the snow. The snow in Duluth is usually too dry to make snowmen; we figured we'd better take advantage of the opportunity." He grinned. "We don't expect to be here another winter. Not past New Years."

Cromwell's eyebrows raised. "In that case, sir, you've got less than a year to find a new vice president and break him in.

"Meanwhile I've got an interesting piece of agreeable news for you."

"I'm always open to good news. What is it?"

"Trenary. We were talking yesterday, and he told me he'd been wrong about you. He liked your speech the other night, I guess. About Wall Street and the IRS. What he actually said was, "That old sonofabitch is sharp and tough, and he's good for the country."

"Well I'll be damned! I kept thinking I needed to replace him, and never got around to it."

He chuckled. "When I find myself putting something off, something I'm not afraid of, I usually leave well enough alone. I tell myself I've probably got a good reason for putting it off, that I just haven't spotted yet."

He gestured at the coffee station. "Cuppa?"

Cromwell glanced at the clock and shook his head. "I don't suppose you saw the papers this morning?"

"Just the usual summary." Haugen grinned again. "We seem to be getting better press lately. Maybe getting shot at helps."

He got up. "We might as well go. And thanks, Jumper, for telling me about Trenary. Maybe some other people are changing their minds about me. Favorably."

They strolled through the west wing, past the old press area, then took the elevator to the "second floor." In a sense it was more of a third floor—ground, first, second—and Haugen used the Cabinet Room there for NSC meetings. A number of staff aides had been ordered to attend, and no one was late despite the weather. At 0930 sharp, the president opened the session.

"All right," he said, "I guess we're all here. The meeting will come to order." He looked at the new CIA director. "Barry, update us on the South African situation."

Roy Barry stood up. "Yes sir. It's been a bloody week there. The RSA government slapped on a complete press censorship of course, and their usual ban on cameras around civil disorders was applied over the entire country. They also slapped on travel restrictions: stopped all air traffic in and out. Crews of foreign ships weren't even allowed on the dock except to handle hawsers."

He smiled. "But we have some cameras a little out of their reach, not only in overflights but from embassy and consulate roofs. And of course, eyewitness descriptions from informants, via embassy and consulate communication centers, not to mention radio monitoring. There were extensive fires in and around Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, and they were pretty bad in Durban, though not so bad in Pretoria and Cape Town. A number of small towns were largely or entirely burned out."

He paused. "It was incomparably worse than the troubles we had here. And there were pitched battles in the black townships, with a lot of shooting. The blacks had succeeded in caching considerable guns and ammunition, including anti-tank rockets which somehow we hadn't gotten an inkling of.

"There've been pitched battles in the townships before of course, but nothing at all like these. And equally relevant, this time the blacks made some obviously planned and fairly disciplined armed raids into white districts. The fires there weren't just a matter of blacks with work permits running amok. Outsiders came in shooting, some in cars and trucks.

"The blacks got more than they dished out, of course; they were outgunned, untrained, and their organization is still rudimentary. But they dished out a
lot
more than they ever had before. They made considerable use of gasoline bombs, and mostly they didn't pause to watch or loot. It was hit and go on to the next block. Apparently white deaths ran well into the thousands; white police and military casualties alone clearly ran into the hundreds. Black deaths ran into the tens of thousands. And property damage..." He shrugged. "It has to have been well into the billions.

"The RSA called all their troops home from Namibia, partly because of stepped-up raids out of Mozambique. And even Zimbabwe, which has been pretty cautious about harboring guerrillas. But the raids weren't as heavy as we'd thought they might be; apparently the blowup caught them unprepared to take full advantage of it."